TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – April 12, 2012 – In most cases, people who purchase condominium units from bulk buyers won’t be able to sue them if there are construction defects or other problems.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott last week signed a bill that extended the protections for investment groups that have bought multiple units in a building. That means the investors don’t have any more responsibility than other buyers in the building.

The measure went into effect July 1, 2010, and Scott extended it for three more years until July 2015.

Florida law used to consider a developer anyone who bought more than seven units in a building of 70 units or more. Those buyers were forced to assume the same legal and financial risks as developers who build condos.

The bill eliminated the title of developer for bulk buyers, giving investment groups more incentive to make deals for deeply discounted units.

While investors scooped up South Florida condos, “a lot of other areas in Florida are having problems in terms of absorbing unsold units,” said Marty Schwartz, a Miami lawyer and a co-sponsor of the bill.

Some investor groups have proposed making the bill’s protections permanent.

“I still think there’s a need for it, but only for a limited period of time,” said Donna DiMaggio Berger, a Broward County lawyer who represents condo associations statewide. “Why would we want to make it permanent when the (housing) market is no longer distressed?”

From late 2008 until September 2011, investor groups made more than 100 bulk deals for condos in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties, according to CondoVultures.com, a Bal Harbour-based consulting firm. The total dollar value was nearly $3 billion.

Commercial Investors Eye Single-Family Homes

Published on: Wednesday, March 07, 2012

Written by: David Bodamer

U.S. federal agencies are casting about for ways to pull the country’s housing market from the brink as reports from the Case-Schiller National Index indicate housing price falls for the eighth straight month. The Federal Housing and Finance Agency has announced a pilot program that will allow commercial investors to buy foreclosed single-family homes in bulk. The plan has several high-profile backers who are anxious for the opportunity to bid on these properties. Once purchased, the properties could be rented out or resold. For more on this continue reading the following article from National Real Estate Investor.

But might there be an unlikely savior on the horizon for the single-family sector in the form of commercial real estate investors? On Monday, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) announced a pilot program through which it would take bids from investors to buy foreclosed residential properties in bulk for the purpose of turning them into rentals.

The pilot program is the result of an effort launched last summer by the FHFA, along with the Treasury Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to solicit outside input on how the government could deal with its millions of real estate owned (REO) residential assets and help turn the housing market around. The first pool of assets is a group of 2,490 properties, including 2,849 units in some of the hardest-hit residential markets: Atlanta, Chicago, Florida, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Phoenix. There are 1,743 single-family homes, 527 condos, seven manufactured homes, one co-op, 118 duplexes, 36 three-unit buildings and 58 four-unit buildings.

To date, investors have purchased homes in foreclosure auctions and rented them out. But investors can only buy one or two assets at a time this way. The idea here is to enable investors to buy larger pools of foreclosed homes in order to get them on the market as rentals and deal with the glut of troubled assets more quickly.

“This is another important milestone in our initiative designed to reduce taxpayer losses, stabilize neighborhoods and home values, shift to more private management of properties and reduce the supply of REO properties in the marketplace,” FHFA Acting Director Edward J. DeMarco said in a statement.

Investors must fill out a qualifying form on the FHFA’s REO Asset Disposition page, post a security deposit and sign a confidentiality agreement to access detailed information about the properties. According to the FHFA, only investors who qualified through this process will be eligible to bid.

INITIATIVE’S BACKERS

The concept of involving the private sector to help solve the foreclosure problem has some high-profile backers.

Lew Ranieri, who helped pioneer mortgage-backed securities in the 1970s, and Kenneth Rosen, chairman of real estate market research firm Rosen Consulting Group, are the main authors on a policy paper issued this monthlaying out how the private sector’s involvement could help turn around the housing market and deliver attractive returns to investors.

“Without question, this is an opportunistic place to make investments,” Rosen says. “It’s similar to what opportunity funds have done with commercial real estate. There are more than one million units to be auctioned. Instead of having small players buy the assets, this would allow for bulk acquisitions.”

Overall, 453,266 residential units are currently classified as REO. Of those, the federal government holds nearly 50 percent of the inventory through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and another 9 percent with the Federal Housing Administration. In addition, private label securities hold 33.3 percent of the REO inventory and banks hold 17.5 percent.

But gaining control of those assets is a time-consuming process. In existing auctions, properties are sold one at a time. Private equity investors have gotten involved in converting vacant homes into rental properties, according to Rosen. But creating bulk programs could increase interest by making it easier for large investors to amass portfolios.

Investors then have several strategies for how to handle the assets. According to the policy paper, “Homes can be purchased for three potential outcomes, depending on a range of factors: the micro-conditions of the home, employment and income of potential tenant/owners and the macro-conditions of the neighborhood and market.” Specifically, investors could choose to offer the units in rent-to-own, rent-to-rent or resale arrangements.

In a rent-to-own scenario, an investor would enter a long-term relationship with a tenant who would offer the renter a right-of-refusal to buy the home. The lease could also be structured to give the tenant a share of any upside in a property’s sale. According to the policy paper, “This share can be structured to be payable regardless of whether or not the tenant purchases the home or be restricted to only if the tenant converts to ownership. This share can be pro-rated down or eliminated if a tenant leaves before the ?ve-year term.”

In a rent-to-rent scenario, the investor operates the asset as a straight rental property. And a resale would simply involve moving the asset to an owner-occupier.

“The private sector has a lot of solutions to the mortgage problem,” Rosen says. “They are engaged and want to be involved. I think this is something that has to be pushed as fast as it can.”

One caveat Rosen notes is that the government needs to ensure that the participants in the program are legitimate players. For example, the policy paper notes, “Programs that we deem to be unscrupulous are requiring tenants to pay a down-payment when signing a lease. We believe ?rst and last month’s rent and/or a security deposit in keeping with state law is acceptable, but do not believe additional advance payments are warranted.”

If all goes well, Rosen thinks the pilot program could be expanded “full scale” within a year with the government offering its inventory in bulk sales as well as banks and private-label securities conducting similar programs.